


Getaway Mile

by sassbandit



Series: Draculoids-verse [1]
Category: Bandom, Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Album), Mindless Self Indulgence, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Apocalypse, BLI, Disaster, Gen, Prequel, WIP, WIP Amnesty, danger days, evil corporation, post-9/11
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-12-16
Updated: 2012-12-16
Packaged: 2017-11-21 07:50:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/595275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sassbandit/pseuds/sassbandit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Early 2012. The events that lead to the BLI-run world we see in Danger Days. LynZ wakes thinking there's been an earthquake, but it's much, much worse...</p><p>This is a prequel to "Draculoids Will Never Hurt You", which I started working on for BBB then realised I could never finish.  I'm posting what I have under WIP amnesty.  Just to be clear: this is unfinished, and will probably never be finished. It's also unbeta'd and probably full of holes. ENJOY!</p><p>I've rated it G for general audiences, but it is a disaster story with specific echos of 9/11, so I mention that as a possible thing that some people might want to avoid.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. LynZ

Lindsey wakes, disoriented, from a dream about washing dishes. She feels herself dropping a plate and smashing it on the floor, and it takes her a moment to realise that there are no dishes, and that what woke her was a jolt that shook the whole building, and the crashing sound she can hear is breaking glass. The movement subsides into a sickening shaking rumble, and Lindsey groans and pulls her pillow over her head, curling her knees up to her chest. 

After a few seconds it dies away, and she can hear alarms going off all over the place, car alarms and building alarms and fire alarms, through the empty place where her bedroom window was. She pulls the pillow off her head and turns over, grumbling under her breath. Her pulse is racing, adrenaline spiking belatedly through her veins. She’d rather be asleep, but it’s not going to happen, so she sits up cautiously and looks around her.

It’s early, just barely getting light outside, but her bedside alarm clock’s dark so the power’s probably out. There’s enough light coming from outside though — it’s nearly dawn, and there’s a glow that might be emergency lights or something — that she can see glass scattered on the carpet and shit fallen all over the place. As she reaches down to try and find some shoes on the floor near her bed, she realises there’s plaster dust all over her duvet and sheets, too. Fuck, this is going to be a bitch to clean up. If it’s as bad as it looks, though, she’s probably not going to have to go to work. 

She pulls on a pair of Docs that were buried under her laundry, over her bare feet, and a skirt from the same pile, then feels her way carefully through her dark apartment and downstairs. There are people in the hallway, and someone saying, "Don’t use the elevator," so she takes the stairs with the rest of her neighbors, all looking bleary and stunned and wearing pyjamas and mismatched clothing.

"It’s gotta be at least a six," someone says, a few steps behind her. "I was here for Northridge, it was just like this, I tell ya. Got me out of bed that time, too."

"There might be aftershocks," someone else says. "What if there’s aftershocks?"

Lindsey’s trying to remember what she’s heard about quakes, whether there’s anything she’s meant to be doing right now, but all she can think of is her outdated first aid certificate and the fact that the emergency water she’s got in the hall cupboard is way more than a year old. Maybe she should’ve turned her power off at the mains before she came out, or done something with the gas. She’s not sure. 

Down in the carpark, she spots Dan and Ricky, the guys who live across from her. She goes to stand with them. "Hey," she says, raising her voice over the alarms that are still going off all over the place.

Dan’s saying, "Let me try it," and trying to take Ricky’s phone from his hand. Oh, right, Lindsey thinks. Her phone. Her wallet. She probably should have grabbed them before she came down.

"There’s _no service_ ," Ricky says. "You trying it won’t help." 

"Let me try it anyway," Dan says. "You’ve probably got the network turned off or something. Oh, hey, Linds."

She takes the time to look around while the guys are bickering. There’s a guy with bare, bleeding feet sitting on the curb, and an older lady crying and gasping and hugging herself, while people hover round ineffectually. She should maybe go see if she can help, expired first aid certificate or not, but it doesn’t look like they’re dying so first she wants to get a handle on what’s going on. 

It seems like someone’s managed to turn a few of the alarms off, but there’s still one really obnoxious one screaming from the hair salon across the road, and flashing a blue light that hurts her eyes. There are people out in the street, walking right in the road or clustered round talking to each other. All the houses have broken windows, and one down near the corner is tilted precipitously, its top floor half detached from the lower. Water’s flowing from a busted hydrant a couple of doors down, and there are dogs barking and howling.

There’s not many cars out on Lindsey’s street at this hour of the morning, but if she looks down the block she can see traffic stopped on the cross-street, cars pulled up in the middle of the road, people standing by their vehicles. Beyond that, as she lets her eyes focus on the distance, she can see the glow that’s lighting the sky. All around, but mostly to the east, there’s a sinister orange aura over the skyline and smoke in the air. Looks like a good part of the city’s on fire, fuck. She listens for sirens, but she can’t hear anything over the nearer alarms.

"Alright," someone says, loudly, right behind her. Lindsey turns round. It’s Shereen, the heavy-set lady with the big earrings who lives on the first floor and came to say hi and introduce herself when Lindsey moved in. She’s wearing a bright green vest and a helmet over her pink nightdress and trackpants, and holding a notebook and pen. Lindsey raises her eyebrows. Oh… kay. "Everybody listen up!" Shereen shouts. People start wandering over to see what's going on. 

"I'm a trained emergency responder," Shereen says, pitching her voice to carry through the crowd, "and obviously we've got an emergency situation here. It doesn't look like we've got too much damage right here, but I'm gonna have to go check out the rest of the street, so I could use a hand. If any of you have done the CERT training, come see me. If anyone knows of any dangerous situations, people trapped, anything like that, come see me. We also need to turn off the gas at the mains, so if anyone wants to help with that, stick around and I'll show you what needs doing." People start shuffling around a bit, some moving closer, some moving away. "Fire department probably won't be able to make it to us, so let's try not to have any fires here if we can help it. Who knows how to use a fire extinguisher?" A smattering of people raise their hands. "If there's any fires here, we need get 'em while they're small. Anyone know first aid?" A few other people raise their hands, and Lindsey puts hers up halfway, just to her shoulder. She's pretty sure she remembers most of it. "We've got a couple of people could use some help," Shereen says, "but I'm gonna be busy doing other things, so you sort it out among yourselves."

Lindsey finds herself with the first aiders. There's a handful of people there, and when Lindsey admits she's way out of date, the guy who's taking the lead frowns. "We're probably okay for now," he says. "Doesn't look like we got too many casualties. You wanna help with something else?"

"Okay," says Lindsey, and backs away. They're already getting out their first aid kits and scattering to deal with the people nearby who have injuries. Lindsey sees Shereen with another guy doing something by the entrance to the parking lot, so she goes over to them. "Hey," she says. "Shereen." Shereen looks back over her shoulder. "You got anything I can do?" Lindsey asks.

"Yeah, you can deal with the gas with Nico here. You got it?" she asks Nico.

"Got it," Nico says, with a tight little smile. Shereen hands him a couple of tools and heads off to do something else. She's got SHEREEN stencilled on the back of her green vest, across her butt.

"This is the gas mains," Nico says, and Lindsey stops staring at Shereen and pays attention. Nico shows her how they need to turn the valve. "Quarter turn, see? We gotta do the whole street, just in case."

"What about the electricity?"

Nico frowns, puzzled. "Don't know," he says. "Power's out everywhere. Shereen didn't say anything."

"'Kay," says Lindsey. "Just the gas for now." She tosses the wrench in the air, flipping it, and catches it. "Let's do this."

They've covered half of one side of the street, hunting out the gas mains at each place and turning them off, talking to shaken, upset neighbors who let them through gates and into garages, when Nico pauses and stares down the street. There's something weird going on down there, people clustered around and arguing.

"My dad's down there," Nico says. He hands Lindsey his wrench and hurries down the street to him. Lindsey follows, and catches up with him when as reaches the knot of people standing in the road.

"Papá, ¿qué tiene de malo?" Nico asks.

His father, a middle aged man with a mustache, starts to answer in rapid-fire Spanish but switches to English part way. "She says she saw a flash. I ask her what flash. She say, atom bomb." He gestures to the old lady Lindsey saw earlier, hugging herself and crying.

"I saw it, I tell you," says the old woman. "I was sitting by my window. I don't sleep so well any more, so I always get up early. There was a flash, a bright flash, right over downtown."

One of the first aiders is putting a blanket over her shoulders. "Mrs Luciano," he says, "come and sit down."

"I saw it, I saw a flash," she insists as he leads her away.

"There is no flash," says Nico's father. "No flash, just this earthquake. Que está loca."

The people standing nearby are worried and upset. Some of them have their phones out, but nobody can get service. The lights are still out, though the sun's risen. It's a dirty, grey-orange sunrise, though, the sun coming through the haze and smoke to the east, with a strange electric feel to the air like there might be rain.

Nico's still with his dad, and Lindsey suddenly wants to get away, to go back up to her apartment and get dressed properly, get her wallet and her phone, wash her face and hands. Nobody pays any attention to her as she goes inside and works her way upstairs. Her apartment's on the third floor, at the far end of the hall. She doesn't have her keys, but she realises she didn't even lock her apartment door behind her.

There's light inside, now, a grey murky daylight from the broken windows. She finds a pair of jeans and some socks and a bra, all clean, and puts on deodorant and brushes her hair, pulling it into fresh pigtails. The water sputters in the bathroom sink, but she manages to wash her face and brush her teeth. She picks up her lipstick, opens it, but pauses in front of the mirror and puts the cap back on. She puts it in her pocket.

She can't make coffee without electricity, but she opens the hall closet and pulls out the flat of water bottles she has there. She's pretty sure bottled water doesn't actually go off. She opens one and drinks as she goes back to her room and finds her wallet, her keys, her phone.

Sitting at the kitchen table, she puts the phone down in front of her. It's 7:43 am. She has no signal. No phone, no wifi, nothing. She flicks between apps, knowing she can't access anything but checking out of habit. Twitter, Facebook, text messages. There's messages from last night, from Kitty asking her to bring the latest Fringe eps to rehearsal and from Jimmy making dick jokes, but nothing current, no matter how many times she taps the refresh button.

Lindsey's been in California long enough to know that when there's an earthquake, everyone's tweeting before the tremors even settle. Usually by now she'd be swapping notes with friends to see who felt it, and opening browser tabs to check the magnitude. The fact she can't means it must be a big one. Six? Seven maybe? Worse? The smoke and the unsettling color of the sky make her worried. Maybe where she is was just the edge of it. She thinks of Mrs, what was her name, Mrs Luciano, downstairs, all her talk about a flash. Like an atom bomb.

The radio. You're meant to listen to the radio in an emergency, right? But the only radio she listens to is streaming. Fuck, she has no idea. It's like all the stuff they taught when she was a kid is useless now. Then she remembers, she _does_ have a radio. In the hall closet. Not with the emergency supplies, that would be too obvious, but in that box she never unpacked when she moved. It's a shower radio, waterproof and with a plastic hook to hang it from the shower head. She's never even used it, but, like so many things, it seemed like a good idea when she was wandering in a daze through Bed Bath  & Beyond. It needs batteries, so she takes it with her to her room, and sits on the bed while she digs in the side table where she keeps her vibrators. There are some AAs rolling around loose in the bottom of the drawer, and she pops them into the radio.

There's nothing but static. She works through the dial from 90 to 108, then flips the little switch and turns the dial all the way back through the AM frequencies. She thinks she hears a faint echo of something, but there's no news broadcasts, no emergency signal, not even right-wing talkback or ads for car dealerships or any of the things she stopped listening to radio to avoid. It might just be… atmospheric disturbance, something like that. Lots of dust in the air, power lines down all over the place. She looks out the window, and yeah, there's something that looks like lightning crackling in the air over downtown LA, blue-white flashes in the dense dark cloud. It's hard to make out anything in that direction, between the glow of the fires and all the crud in the air and the buildings in the way, but it looks like whatever happened, it's definitely big.

She steps back from the window, grinding shards of window glass into the carpet as she walks over them. She can clean the worst of it up by hand, but she'll need to vacuum before she can walk barefoot anywhere in her apartment. She's trying to decide whether to do it now, or wait til later, when the first drops of rain fall.


	2. Alicia

Alicia's got a cigarette in one hand, a red plastic cup in the other, and she's standing halfway up the stairs of the house where the party is, laughing as some of the techs tell drummer jokes. It's not that they're funny, or that she hasn't heard them all before, but she's having a fucking good night and she's in the mood to enjoy herself.

They're midway through the tour, at that point where everyone's settled in but nobody's sick of it yet. It's shaping up well. There hasn't been any more than the usual amount of drama, and Alicia knows to stay clear of it anyway. You don't fuck anyone in the bands, you don't act like you expect special treatment because you're a girl, and above all you don't complain. She was at the venue as late as anyone, lugging cases and merch boxes through the venue's backstage maze and out to the vans and buses that make up the tour, and she's aching and maybe she's got a bit of a sore throat that might turn into something, but right now she's got a Solo cup full of beer and a wall to lean against and a good buzz from the show, and she's where she wants to be. 

The openers were a local band, and the party's at their place. Or their friends' place or something, Alicia's not too sure and doesn't care. Somewhere somewhere between suburban and industrial, an ugly older house with stained carpet and mismatched futons and beanbags in the living room and gig flyers on the kitchen wall and half the local scene crowded in there cheerfully shouting at each other over the music that's playing. 

"Hey," some guy says as he pushes past up the stairs, "I saw you at the merch table."

Alicia looks at him. Skinny, drunk, likely to be annoying. She shrugs and says, "Yeah."

"Are you with the band? I mean, one of the bands, whatever. On the tour." He waves his hand around, then squints at her. "What band _are_ you with?"

"Hey," Alicia says, pushing up from the wall, "I gotta go find someone, sorry." 

She does want to find Sarah, actually; avoiding the drunk, annoying fanboy is just an added benefit. She left Sarah in the kitchen when she went to pee, so she heads back there to see if she's still round. The kitchen's crammed, but Sarah's not there so Alicia refills her cup from the keg and works her way out through the other door, into what turns out to be a concrete sort of a yard scattered with plastic lawn chairs and people smoking. Sarah's by the back fence, talking to another chick wearing one of the opener's shirts.

"Heyyy," says Sarah, tucking her arm round Alicia's waist and giving her a squeeze. "What's up, girl?"

"Not much," Alicia says, draping her arm over Sarah's shoulder. "Share," she says, and Sarah hands over the cigarette she's smoking so Alicia can take a drag.

"This is Jamia," Sarah says, introducing the girl she was talking to. "She's starting up her own label."

"Yeah?" Alicia says, blowing smoke to the side.

"Working on it," Jamia says. "I'm just in the planning stages, you know?"

"Cool," Alicia says. "I've got some friends back home who run their own label. It's a lot of work."

"That's what they tell me," Jamia says. "Actually, I do some work for Eyeball already. I just want to do my own thing." Right, Alicia thinks, Eyeball Records -- they're the label the openers are on. Alicia saw their stuff on one of the merch tables.

"You're friends with the band?" Alicia asks, tilting her chin at Jamia's tshirt.

"Oh, yeah, they're from Kearny," Jamia says. "Adam, he's the bass player, he went to my high school. The Jersey scene's fucking incestuous, you know?"

Alicia laughs. "Same everywhere," she says.

"Not like Jersey," Jamia says, and looks like she's ready to argue the point.

"Whatever." It's not like Alicia's going to get into a fight over whose scene's more incestuous. "I'm gonna go back in and find the guys," she says. "You coming?"

"Nah," Sarah says, pulling away and waving her cigarette as an excuse. "I'm gonna stay out here for a bit."

"It's hot inside," Jamia says.

"It's hot out here too." Alicia's kind of sticky all over. It's the humid Jersey weather.

Sarah shrugs, and kisses Alicia on the cheek. "No point moving, then. I'll catch you soon, 'kay?"

"Sure."

Alicia wanders back in, feeling unreasonably irritated at Jamia and her _my scene's more incestuous than your scene_ thing. Well, whatever. She and Sarah have got their own incestuous tour gang and they'll be moving on tomorrow. She decides to go find them now. 

She wants to hang with Rob, who's always awesome fun. He's one of the guitar techs, and Alicia's known him for ages. He went to _her_ highschool, back in Minnesota, but a few years before her; she never met him til she started working shows. He's a weird guy. First time they met, she thought he was hitting on her. Then when it turned out he wasn't, she thought he was gay. Eventually she figured out he's just socially awkward and not very good at talking to girls. He's a sweetie, though, and when she finds him upstairs in a bedroom, sitting on the floor with a bunch of people passing a bottle of bourbon around, he holds out his arm so she can tuck herself up against his side, and hands her the bottle.

"How's it going, Miss Pain?" he asks.

Shit, almost nobody calls her that any more. "That's Mistress Pain to you," she laughs, swigging from the bottle then wiping her mouth. She grimaces, then takes another swig before handing it back.

"That good, huh?"

She shrugs. "It's cool," she says. "Good show."

"Yeah," Rob says. They'd both watched from sidestage, Rob ducking out to deal with guitar shit every so often, Alicia just leaning against a pillar and taking it in. Starland Ballroom's a good venue, and it was packed. The whole tour's been good so far, but this was definitely one of the better shows. Tomorrow they head south, a late bus call and just a short ride to Philly, then on to D.C. after that, and a few more stops Alicia's a little fuzzy on before ending in Atlanta. Alicia's half trying to remember whether it's Jacksonville or Charlotte and which days they have off, half listening to Rob's opinions on the new drum riser and whether Jay's going to break something jumping off it.

"Yeah, maybe," Alicia says. "I am kinda wiped. Do you think anyone's going back to the hotel?"

"I've got the keys to the van," Rob says. "Wanna ride?"

"You don't mind?" Normally they'd stay way later than this, but Alicia's just not feeling it.

Rob looks around, pretty clearly taking in the loose knots of people standing and sitting around drinking and talking shit. It's not that different to what they've done a hundred times before, nothing they'll regret missing too much. "Sure," he says. "It's no big deal. I might come back after."

"'Kay," Alicia says, pulling herself to her feet. "Let me find Sarah and let her know."

"Five minutes, out the front," Rob says, jingling the keys.

"What time is it?" Sarah asks, when Alicia finds her still outside in the yard with Jamia and explains that she's gonna go crash. They'd been sitting close together on a low brick wall, and Sarah had stood up when Alicia came out, Jamia quickly getting up as well, knocking over an empty cup and picking it up awkwardly.

Alicia pulls out her phone and checks the time on it. "Three-thirty," she says. "Almost."

"Early," says Sarah. "You can't leave yet." 

"Stay and party," says Jamia. "This'll keep going a while yet. You haven't even met the band. Our band, I mean."

Alicia's about to point out that she met them before the show, when there's a sudden burst of light over the back fence, like lightning but brighter. "What the fuck --" she says, blinking the after-images away. She's blinded, like someone just took a flash photo without warning, and it takes ages for her eyes too work properly again.

While she's waiting, there's a shaking sensation under her feet, like the rumble like trucks on an overpass, and just seconds after that, a hot, chemical-smelling wind that makes her hair blow in her face and the back of her throat prickle.

"Holy cocksucking motherfucking _fuck_." It's Jamia talking. "Was that… how close was that?" She turns and she's about to run off somewhere but Alicia grabs her by the arm.

"Wait," she says. The flash after-effects are gone from her eyes, finally, and she can see Jamia's freaking out. "We don't know what that was. Just… don't freak out, okay?"

"I'm not freaking out," Jamia says. "And that was… I think it was the fucking _city_. We can get up on the roof. Come on."

There's other people standing around in the yard, too, and when Jamia starts to push past them like she knows where she's going, some of them fall in behind her, so she's got a crowd following her into the house. Alicia and Sarah are right on her tail as she heads upstairs. "There's a fire escape that goes up on the roof," Jamia says over her shoulder, then the lights flicker and go out.

People are calling out and shouting and asking whether anyone's got a flashlight. A couple of people pull out cigarette lighters. Alicia pulls out her phone and presses the power button so the screen glows blueish-grey in the dark, casting a vague aura of light around them. She holds it over her head and says, "Come on," pushing at Jamia to keep moving.

They shove a window open and Jamia leads them out and up onto the roof, where they stand, holding onto the metal bars of the top of the fire escape, looking towards the bright ball of fire over what must be Manhattan. People are coming up behind them, and each one in turn stops, transfixed, as they reach the roof and see the orange glow against the complete blackness of the power outage.

After a long time, punctuated only by the gasps and "holy fucks" of more people coming onto the roof, Sarah says, "I can't make out the skyline."

Alicia keeps her mouth shut. She's pretty sure there _is_ no skyline any more. For a moment she gets a visual image of Manhattan with the twin towers intact, like it is in old movies. She realises she can't even quite visualise it with them gone, even though she's sure there have been movies made in the last decade that show it. Now it's _all_ gone.

Beside her, Sarah's pulling out her phone and starting to take photos. The fireball's rising and spreading. A messy sort of pillar's forming below it, streaked with darker red, and there's a bunch of smaller fires spread out around it. It's not a mushroom cloud, at least not like the ones Alicia's seen videos of, but it's not far from it. She should get a photo herself. She pulls up her camera app and tries to focus on it. It's distant, but she doesn't have to zoom in to get it, it's so huge.

She tries to pull up Facebook so she can post the pic, but it just sits there showing her the logo, not loading. Oh. She realises she has no signal, not a single bar. The cell phone towers must have lost power, too. Around her, more people are pulling out their phones and taking photos, video, trying to get in touch with people, and their voices are starting to rise. 

"What network are you on?"

"Can you even dial 911?"

"The whole system's down, you moron. Nothing has power."

"Is there a landline? Whose house is this anyway?"

"I need to call my mom, fuck, I need to call --"

Alicia catches Rob's eye, and he comes over to her. He doesn't get too close, just stands with his hands in his pockets, facing the same direction as she is.

"Fuck," she says, figuring that about sums it up.

"Fuck," he agrees.

Sarah's trying to get on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, anything. She keeps staring at her phone, prodding at it, trying to make it do what she wants. "How long is it going to be down?" she asks.

Rob shrugs. "That big northeast blackout was a couple of days. Could be at least that big."

"What about the tour?" someone says, hesitantly.

"The tour's fucking _off_ ," Alicia says, turning on the dumbass who asked, feeling rage pounding in her temples that someone could even ask about the tour when New York City's a fucking fireball. "There is no fucking tour. Don't you get it? It's over."

It's over. They're going to head back to their hotel and their buses and… fuck, she doesn't even know what's going to happen next, but the idea of heading to Philly and playing another show tomorrow night, and the next night in D.C., is so ridiculous she almost laughs. Whatever this is, it's not something they're going to just pick themselves up from and keep going.


	3. Kitty

Kitty pays for her coffee with two crumpled dollar bills and a handful of quarters that were hiding out in the cup-holder. She takes a long sip of her sugary red-eye through the hole in the plastic cap before pulling back out into traffic. She's running on five hours' sleep after going out with Jimmy and Chantal last night, but she needs to the warehouse, pick up a pile of lighting gear, and get it out to the lot before the crew get on-site at eight. She takes a moment to swear under her breath at whoever didn't test shit properly before they sent it out there in the first place, then settles in for the drive. The traffic's moving slowly, but at least it's moving. At least she's got her iPod. She plugs it in to the car stereo and hits shuffle. 

She's stopped at the lights when she's suddenly blinded. The flash is so sudden, so bright, it's like staring into the sun. Her eyes water and she blinks rapidly, trying to see again. She hasn't thought any further than _what the fuck was that?_ but some instinct, something in her subconscious, makes her duck down behind her steering wheel, as low as she can go, and cover her face with her arms, so when the blast arrives, punching through her car, she's at least a little bit protected from flying pieces of shattered windscreen[laminated windscreen glass doesn't shatter like this. fix.]. Right on the tail of that, there's a scorching wind, and she feels it blowing across her bare arms and across the back of her neck, like the heat from an oven. 

The wind passes, but Kitty keeps her head down a while longer[earthquake/ground shake???], and doesn't come up and look around until she starts to hear other people moving around, through the ringing in her ears. As she sits upright, little cubes of shattered safety glass fall from her shoulders and out of her hair. Her eyes are still watering, but she can see that the cars on [road] are piled into each other, and there are people screaming. She's a little way back from the intersection, and the cars around her were all stationary. People are starting to get out of their cars, staring around in shock. Some of them are bleeding. A guy in the next car over has cuts all over his face.

Kitty takes stock of her own situation. She's a little scratched up, mostly on her arms. The skin there's pink, too, like she got a sunburn, and feels warm when she presses it with her fingertips. In the back seat, all the trash and random crap that was lying there's been tossed around, and she thinks some of it's gone out the back window. Her seatbelt unfastens when she tries, and the doors open okay, so she won't have any trouble getting out of the car, but before she does that she turns the ignition, just to see if the car still goes. There's a faint clicking, and nothing else. Kitty frowns. 

"You okay?" The voice comes from over to the side, and Kitty turns round and sees it's the guy in the next car who took a windscreen to the face. He's got blood trickling down his cheeks, spotting his blue shirt.

"Yeah," she says. "Uh, shouldn't I be asking you that?"

"What?" he says, looking puzzled.

"You're… you look pretty cut up. Are you okay?"

"Oh." The guy touches his face, then reaches for his rear-view mirror, trying to get a look at himself. Kitty can see it's more or less intact, and the guy examines himself, touching the cuts. "I don't think it's too bad," he says. "Just scrapes."

"Do you want -- do you have anything to clean yourself up with?" Kitty asks. She grabs a wad of paper napkins from the glove compartment, gets out, and goes over to hand them to the guy through his empty car window.

Now she's out of her car, she can see down the line of vehicles behind her, see other people sitting in their cars or slowing coming out, standing uncomfortably in the road, staring at the mess on [road] or beyond it, where there's a, fuck, there's a fucking _mushroom cloud_ forming, right over downtown LA.

"Fuck," Kitty says out loud. 

Blue-shirt-guy turns and follows her gaze, and echoes her expletive. "Is that a… it can't be a nuke, can it?" he asks, lowering his voice.

"No," Kitty says, automatically, then, "Yes. It, it could be. It looks like it." 

Neither of them says anything for a long moment. Kitty's mind's racing, trying to figure out what to do. If it's a nuke, there'll be radiation and stuff. She needs to get home.

"The news," blue-shirt says. "There has to be something. The radio." He goes to turn it on, but just like Kitty's car, nothing happens when he turns the ignition. "Damn," he says, and turns the key again.

"Mine wouldn't start either," Kitty says. Her phone's in her pocket, though, and there's sure to be a million people already posting status updates about it, maybe some headlines on CNN.com already. But when she presses the button to turn the phone on, it just flickers on for a moment, then goes blank. "My phone's busted."

"So's mine," the guy says, holding up a Blackberry, its screen blank. "Shit, shit, I've read about this. It's an EMP. All the electronics will be fried."

EMP, yeah. That makes sense: electromagnetic pulse, one of the effects of a nuclear explosion. Kitty's got her toolkit in the trunk, and when she rummages around and finds her multimeter, it's just as fucked as everything else, even though it's about the simplest piece of electronic equipment she's got.

"I have to get home," Kitty says, throwing the multimeter back in her toolkit and dumping out the contents of her backpack, turning them over and discarding the CDs, the stage tech handbook, the plastic bag full of hair dye and brushes that she'd forgotten to take out last night. She keeps the gym towel, the granola bars, the baseball cap, and the black hoodie. There's a couple of bottles of water in the back seat, so she throws them in, along with some more of the paper napkins from the glove compartment and the ownership papers. Thank fuck she's already wearing work boots and pretty sturdy cargo pants[July in LA… cargo pants? shorts? check with a local.], since she was going to be out on the lot today; she doesn't like to think about trying to get home in impractical shoes.

"How are you going to do that?" the guy asks. "The roads are -- how far are you going, anyway?"

"Only about five miles," she says. "Six. Something like that. You should try and go home too. Get under cover, at least." The sky's looking weird, the sun orange-red as it rises, and there are dark clouds spreading. She shoulders her backpack and picks up her toolkit. It's heavy and awkward, but she has a feeling she'll be needing it.

The roads are clogged with stalled cars, despite the early hour. Some people are still sitting in them, but a few are standing outside their cars, holding their cellphones in their hands, trying to tend injuries. The buildings along the way are all wrecked, too: shattered windows, facades cracked, a few ominously tilted on their foundations. There are fallen electrical wires, which she avoids, and fires all over the place. Even the few trees and shrubs that line the street look battered and scorched.

At the next intersection there's another pile-up of cars that were moving when it happened. Kitty sees knots of cars that have slammed into each other, crumpled metal, more sparkling pebbles of broken auto glass. People are bleeding and lying on the ground, and others are milling around, trying to help people out of their wrecked vehicles or call 911. She turns left to avoid it; she doesn't want to see any more than she has already, and anyway, she'll probably move faster off the main road.

"Who the fuck walks in L.A.?" she mutters to herself, and sets to estimating how far she has to go and how long it will take. Probably more than five miles, call it six or seven. More if she keeps detouring to avoid stuff. The smaller streets are less of a mess, fewer cars and less debris on the sidewalks since the buildings are set back further from the road. Still, it's going to be a few hours. She looks up at the sky, which is looking increasingly ominous. "Fuck," she says. Her toolkit's already making her hands hurt carrying it, and the way it keeps bumping against her legs means she's going to be covered in bruises. She puts as much as she can in her backpack, leaving behind the trashed multimeter and some of the things she's got duplicates of at home. With the baseball cap on her head, granola bars in the pockets of her cargos, and a bottle of water in her hand, the rest of it fits okay.

Home. She just wants to get home. It's just a shitty apartment that she doesn't even like that much, but it's where all her stuff is and she wants to be there. She's got a landline phone. There's nothing plugged into it, she just got it for the cheap Internet, but it exists and maybe it's less fucked up than her cell. Her family will probably be freaking out, but if she's home, she can get in touch and tell them she's all right. And her apartment's further from downtown, from the blast, and that's got to be good. She's read enough and seen enough movies to know that nuclear explosions -- and that had to be a nuclear explosion, right? Otherwise why the mushroom cloud? -- come with radiation, and the further away you are the better.

Her arms still sting with a prickly heat, and she tries to remember whether that's a bad sign. She used to read all these science fiction books about kids surviving an apocalypse, living in deserted cities, holed up in some distant valley surrounded by a radioactive wasteland, and she's pretty sure those kids would have known more about this shit than she does. They probably would have found some kind of underground shelter. There's not much chance of finding an underground shelter here, though, and if she tries to take shelter in any of the buildings here, it probably won't do her any more good than getting back to her apartment as fast as she can.

She's been walking for almost an hour, as well as she can estimate without her phone, when she realises she's been hearing sirens for a while. Car alarms, burglar alarms, fire alarms. There's even lights flashing, now she looks up from the sidewalk and pays attention. She's come far enough that the electronics here weren't effected. She pulls out her phone and tries it again, just for the hell of it. It's still fried, which makes sense, but it was worth a try.

She stops and looks around. It's a residential block, and there are people standing outside their houses, milling around. Most of them are looking down the street to where there's a fire. It's not too bad, and there are some people running around with fire extinguishers. Right by where she's standing, she can see into a house through the broken windows. There's a middle-aged couple standing, the man's arms around the woman, who's got her face buried against his chest. His face is all scrunched up, too, and he lets go of the woman a moment to wipe his eyes. Kitty looks away.

Part of her wants to stop and help these people, but the urge to get home is stronger. She settles for calling out as she passes some people standing in their driveway. "Hey, you got phone service?" 

They shake their heads. One of them calls back, "Nada. You know what the fuck's going on? Any news?"

She looks back the way she came. There's a dirty red glow behind her, smoke rising all around from fires. "Only what I can see," she says, and lifts a hand in a half-assed wave as she keeps walking.

Before long it starts to rain, if you can even call it that. It's not like L.A. gets much rain, but this would be unusual even if it did. It falls in big dirty splats, at first just a few and then thicker and faster, hitting the pavement with a thwacking sound. The drops that fall on Kitty's skin are viscous, gritty, and grey-black. It's disgusting. She runs and takes cover in a parking lot. Coming on the heels of her thoughts about radioactive wastelands, the rain really fucking freaks her out. She realises it's all over her, and she quickly drops her backpack and strips off her t-shirt, then uncaps her water bottle and sloshes it over her arms to get the rain off them. She empties her backpack and puts on the hoodie she brought with her from the car, zipping it up over her bra, and kicks her t-shirt away into a corner.

"Yo."

Kitty spins around. There's a guy not far from her, just by one of the pillars of the parking lot. She hadn't noticed him in the dark. "Shit," she says. 

"Hey, 's'okay." He's got his hands up, palms facing her. "You got a light?" He waggles one of his hands, and Kitty sees he's got a cigarette between his fingers.

"Oh," says Kitty, trying to pretend like this guy didn't just see her topless. "I think so." She's got a lighter down at the bottom of the side pocket of her bag, among the gum wrappers and loose change that collect there. She hands it over to him.

"You want one?" the guy asks, holding out his cigarette pack.

"I don't usually," Kitty says. "But, yeah, what the hell." She shrugs, looking back over her shoulder.

"Livin' dangerously, huh?" the guy says, deadpan. 

Kitty cracks a smile, the first since it happened. "Could say that," she says. They smoke their cigarettes standing by the pillar, looking out at the black rain falling on the street.

The guy's pretty young, black, and he's wearing blue uniform overalls with a logo on the chest. "Do you work here?" Kitty asks.

"Building maintenance. Came in early," he says with a shrug. "Hey, you wanna come inside? Nicer than the parking lot. Could be rainin' a while."

Kitty looks back outside, looks at the guy standing there. He seems okay. "Yeah, what the hell," she says.

They climb the fire escape stairs that let out into the lobby of a small office block. The light's dim, just the green emergency exit signs and the grey that filters from the windows, but it's enough to see their way by. "There's a break room," the guy says, opening the door to the office and leading Kitty through. The place looks pretty normal apart from the broken windows and some stuff fallen from people's desks, but it's weird to think that these people won't be coming in to work today, maybe won't be coming in for a long time. They have the run of the place.

They round a corner and there's a break room with a table and chairs, a sink, a coffee machine, a fridge. "You want a Coke or anything?" he asks, opening the fridge door. The light doesn't come on.

"You sure this is okay?" Kitty asks.

"Nobody's gonna give a damn," the guy says. "They aren't even gonna notice we've been in here. You just wait. They'll be looting soon out there, if they aren't already." He grabs two Cokes and holds one out to Kitty.

"Sure," she says, realising he's right. "Hey, what's your name?" she asks, as she opens the can.

"Philippe," the guy says.

"Kitty," Kitty says. She drinks her Coke leaning against the counter, and munches on one of the granola bars from her bag. Philippe sits on the table, swinging his feet. 

"You work round here?" he asks.

Kitty shakes her head. "I was in my car, on my way to work when it hit. I'm trying to get home."

"Where's that?" Philippe asks.

Kitty narrows her eyes at him, wonders for a moment whether he's being creepy, but he doesn't seem it. "West L.A.," she says. "I figure it'll take me another hour or two, walking."

He nods, then frowns and stops swinging his feet. "I figure I'm just gonna stay here a while," he says. "My place is on the other side of the city[should specify a neighbourhood, but I don't know what. ask a local! (willowbrook?)]." 

Past where the blast was, Kitty realises. Too far to walk, and he'll have to take a wide loop to avoid downtown. "You got family there?" she asks.

"My brother," he says. "He'll be all right. I figure, I'll just camp out here til the phones are working and the roads are clear. I got everything I need right here."

"Yeah?" Kitty says. Obviously there's a fridge full of soda and stuff, but she wouldn't want to live on it.

"Yeah," Philippe says. "Come on, check this out." He jumps off on the table and gestures her to follow him.

Alone one wall of the office there's a row of big cupboards, and Philippe opens the door of one of them. "Check it," he says. "These guys make those energy bars." He pulls out a box and passes it over, and Kitty sees it's full of the sort of protein bars they sell at gyms.

The box is green and black and says "Monster Mint" on it. "They don't make them here, do they?" Kitty says, thinking that they'd need an actual factory for that.

"Nah, they're just head office, sales people and all that, so they got samples. Hey, you want a t-shirt?" He holds out a promotional shirt with "MONSTER PROTEIN" emblazoned across the chest.

"What? Oh, uh. Yeah." She's embarrassed at him bringing up the whole topless incident, but it's July in L.A. And if the sky clears and she ends up walking the rest of the way home, she'd rather be wearing less than her black hoodie. 

"So I figure I got food, I got clothes, I got water," -- he gestures at a water cooler standing at the end of one of the rows of cubicles -- "The building's pretty secure, nobody's gonna come up here without a key. I figure I got all I need a few days at least, so I'll just sit tight."

"You got a bathroom?" Kitty says.

"Sure," Philippe says, leading the way. "Water's not running, but there'll be a little in the pipes, and the toilets'll flush once."

"I just want to change into this," Kitty says, indicating the t-shirt. Philippe points her in the direction of the restrooms, back near the lobby where they came in. It's dark in there, darker than the rest of the office because there's no windows, but there is an emergency exit light, and it's enough to navigate by its green glow. Kitty goes into the big disabled cubicle, figuring nobody else will need it, and locks the door behind her. She changes her hoodie for the Monster Protein shirt, which is baggy and hangs halfway to her knees, then pulls down her pants and sits to pee. When she's done, she grabs some extra toilet paper, folds it up, and puts it in the pocket of her cargos. She might need it later.

When she comes out, she finds Philippe in a meeting room, standing with his hands in his pockets. The shattered windows leave one wall open to the elements, and there's a view out through the murky rain toward downtown. _Toward where downtown used to be_ , Kitty corrects herself. 

"Who do you think did it?" she asks, after a long silence.

"Terrorists," Philippe says. "Who else?"

"I guess."

Some of the rain's coming in through the windows, but they're standing far enough back they're well clear of any spatters. Kitty's not sure whether they should be worried about the wind too, where there might be some kind of airborne radiation they should be protecting themselves from. "I don't think we should be so close to the window," she says. "There might be radiation or something." 

They wait in the break room, talking desultorily in between long silences, until the rain clears. It's almost noon by the clock on the wall, which seems to still be working, but even though Philippe's cellphone's working enough to turn on and try and get service, there's no signal to be found.

"Well, I'd better be going," Kitty says, picking up her backpack.

"You all right to get home?" Philippe says. "You need anything?" 

"I'll take a few of these," Kitty says, grabbing some Monster Protein bars from the box on the counter and shoving them in her backpack. She fills her water bottles from the cooler on the way out.

"You take care," Philippe says as he opens the fire escape door for her.

"You too," Kitty says. She has a weird urge to hug him, but that would just be awkward, so she ignores it and just waves back at him as she heads down the stairs.

Philippe was right about looting: she sees a bunch of stores with their stuff spilled out of their broken windows, some guys pushing a shopping cart full of beer, another guy struggling with a large, boxed flatscreen TV. She keeps her head down and keeps walking, staying away from shops and from busy roads if she can.

[Kitty walks home, seeing various things along the way including looting, and finds her house kind of trashed. She picks up what she needs and goes to MSI's rehearsal studio.]


	4. Alicia 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is just a little scrap I had of the next section. And that's all there is!

Alicia finds Rob in the parking lot, leaning against one of the buses and smoking. She lifts an eyebrow at him, and he offers her one.

"Thanks," she says, lighting it and inhaling. She stares across the lot at the messy queue leading into the lobby, people standing in loose knots or sitting on the ground, exhausted. It has a bit of the look of the line outside a venue, except that instead of the usual teenagers and twenty-somethings in black t-shirts and eyeliner, the crowd runs from babies and toddlers right through to old people, wearing whatever they could find, and they're surrounded by rolling suitcases and plastic totes, and looking exhausted and shattered. 

It'd taken hours to get back to the hotel -- they'd had to avoid the Turnpike -- and when they'd got there, the first handful of evacuees were already trying to check in. They'd been milling round the front desk, in the dim gloom of the emergency lights and whatever of the weird orange-grey sunlight filtered in from outside, and the hotel staff had been trying to tell them, over and over, that their computers weren't working, that their credit card machines weren't working, that they couldn't check in and there was nothing they could do.

Alicia'd taken one look at them and headed straight for the stairs. The stairwell's dim and lit only by the green EXIT signs, and she has to climb eight floors, but at least the air is cleaner, less full of grit and smoke than outside. For a moment, as she steps out into the hallway where her room is, she thinks her door will be locked shut and her keycard won't open it, but when she gets to her room and tries it, it opens just fine.

Her stuff's right where she left it, and Sarah's is on the other bed. She sits down for a few minutes, staring at the wall, and lets herself feel numb.


End file.
